


A Sleep of Prisoners

by Paian



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode Related, Episode Tag, Episode: s01e01 Children of the Gods (1), Episode: s01e03 The Enemy Within, Episode: s01e05 The Broca Divide, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Missing Scene, Season/Series 01, Sleeping Together, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-08-02
Updated: 2014-08-02
Packaged: 2018-02-11 11:34:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,019
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2066616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paian/pseuds/Paian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On and off, one way and another, Jack and Daniel are sleeping together from the first night Daniel is back on Earth.</p><p>A work-in-progress series of episode tags and insets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Children of the Gods

**the boy with a cart**

"You don't have a guestroom, do you," Daniel said when he came back from taking a leak. He came to a stop midway back to his chair and just stood there. Needle on empty, last of the fumes burned up, sputtering into a stall.

"I don't like guests," said Jack, whose spare room was filled with camping gear and sports equipment and unopened boxes of stuff from his old life, visible through the open doorway when you turned the hall light on to see your way to the bathroom. All the crap most people would pack into the garage until the car didn't fit, destined for the cellar when he finished finishing it, except it had been finished for months and he had no plans to move the crap.

His second beer had been finished for a while. He put the bottle on the coffee table and pushed up from the sofa. "Come on. You can't sleep on this thing. It's too short and it doesn't pull out. You can bunk inside with me."

"I'm used to the floor," Daniel said. Still standing; looking down at it. "A couple of extra blankets -- or there must be an air mattress in with all that -- "

"It's a double bed, Daniel. We're both guys. Not a big deal. Let's go."

>

That night Jack got the best night's sleep he'd had in nearly a year and a half. Hell of a teddy bear, he thought; he should probably get a big, bed-hogging dog, if all he needed to stay down for more than a couple of hours at a stretch was to feel the weight of a warm body on the other side of the thing.

Daniel and he were the same clothing size, but Daniel seemed to be swimming in a jacket that felt comfortably baggy on Jack. Something tightened in his arms and shoulders when he put it on, some unconscious adjustment of muscle and posture, as if it felt like it would fall off, even though it was twice as tailored as the djellaba-like things he'd been living in for a year. As if he tensed against the feel of it grabbing him, instead of relaxing into the natural fall of it. He hunched up. 

He'd hunched up when Jack blew past him to greet Skaara on Abydos, too, which Jack was starting to be sorry about now, not sure what he'd felt he had to prove to anybody there, or maybe the moral was no sleeping with anyone on the first date because he was crap at one-night stands and going to bed with people turned him into a mushy sap whether it was a euphemism for something else or not ... and he'd hunched up before he stepped into the wormhole to Earth. 

In the front hall, Jack clapped his hands on the tense shoulders, gave a squeeze and a shake and a pat, and for a few seconds, while he said something easygoing and mindless and adjusted the jacket's lapels and dropped back for an approving once-over, the awkward set of the shoulders eased, and the jacket fit perfectly.

^ 


	2. The Enemy Within

**the dark is light enough**

He saw it written in the cant of Carter's body as soon as it was over, the angle of her arms framing computer keyboard and monitor, her hyper-intent focus on the equations dripping down the screen. The clear and visible determination to prioritize her work, her unit, her job. No more bonding. No more buddies. All business.

She'd get over it. Right now, that meant squat.

She and Ferretti had left the introductory briefing waxing nostalgic over that little jet pack, telling Kawalsky what he'd missed out on by playing with soldier dolls instead of astronaut dolls. Over the too-big lunch in the half-staffed commissary, it was who got into more scrapes when they were kids; Kawalsky won on sheer volume, Ferretti's were the funniest, and Carter's were the most impressively devious. Neither of them stopped ribbing her, but she gave as good as she got, and by the time the three of them were geared up and hovering like bridesmaids around Daniel to make sure he'd pass muster, they'd forged an honest-to-god camaraderie. What happened to Ferretti shook her up; Gulf or no Gulf, she'd never been a ground operative, and she'd never seen a guy get hit like that. Never seen a friend go down like that. She'd kept vigil by his bedside with Kawalsky, and when Jack had opened his mouth to reprimand her for shorting herself on sleep the night before an op, Kawalsky had caught his eye and shook his head, and he'd let it go.

He said what you said; he'd said it before and he'd probably say it again. The hard one-shoulder squeeze, the gruff compassion. What he'd said to other men under his command; what his COs had said to him and their COs had said to them. A legacy as old as war. He'd had the same fucking talk with Kawalsky.

"His master's was in English," Carter said, when he turned to leave her in peace with her streaming equations.

He pulled up short. He'd never asked, or even wondered; had no idea what Kawalsky had done between promotions, after East Germany when he was rotated out and shipped off to Central America. He swung around but didn't know what to say. Finally managed, "Yeah, well. Always had a book in his pack." He remembered one. D. H. Lawrence. They'd given him grief for reading a romance, he'd said it beat a reprimand for carrying a skin mag -- left the guys impressed with his ingenuity, making jokes about what else he beat, wrestling each other for the book to look for the good parts.

"Medieval lit," she said. "He wrote his thesis on Beowulf and Chaucer. He could tell you the Canterbury Tales as if they happened to some old pals of his."

He walked out and down the corridor, and thought about the guy he'd known, and the guy he hadn't known, and the guy who hadn't even known that he'd had a kid. Next thing he knew he was walking out of the elevator and down another corridor to the converted storeroom where Daniel sat cross-legged and barefoot on the bottom of a scarred old bunk dragged out of storage at Peterson, freshly issued laptop open on the blanket in front of him, legal pad on one knee.

"You knew about Kawalsky and Chaucer?" Jack said. He grabbed a metal folding chair and set it a few feet from the bunk. His legs gave out as he sat, and he hit the seat heavily, felt the frame flex against its bolts. He didn't know why he was here. All the condolences had been expressed hours ago, for the deaths and the dashed hopes. Daniel was trying to do the same thing as Carter, computer screen aglow with Gouldy glyphs, legal pad filled with diagrams and scribbles.

Daniel made an affirmative sound, then glanced over at Jack, blinked the equivalent of a double take, and put his pen down. He considered for a few seconds -- thoughtful, just short of wary, watching Jack's face. Then he said, "He asked me some seemingly casual questions. Pinging me on philology. We did a little dance of mistrust: I expected a prank and he expected academic condescension. Once that was sorted out, we had a really interesting conversation about the military in literature and the changes in the English language. He claimed that scholarship was a hobby, that he'd had to get a master's in something and he liked to read so what the hell, but his perspective was informed and engaging. I look for archaeological data in phonetics and orthography. He looked for the similarities in the stories that matter to people."

"Well, fuck," Jack said.

Daniel clipped the pen to the pad and started closing up books and stacking them on the floor. Except for what the frosted pane in the door let in from the hall, the only light in the room came from the laptop screen, dimmed to half by the screensaver, and it snapped off when Daniel shut the lid. He uncrossed his legs and put the laptop on the footlocker at the other end of the bedframe.

Jack slumped slowly forward over his knees, elbows on his thighs. He was an officer; he'd been through this before; he'd cope. But it was bad, right now. It was bad.

Daniel stripped down to his shorts and swung himself up into the top bunk. "Take mine," he said.

Jack was sluggish and fumbling with his bootlaces, slow and wobbly untangling his legs from the pants he left half inside-out on the floor, but the center of the blanket he rolled into was still warm. Daniel's presence in the bunk above him was like the press of a steadying hand. He ached with gratitude he couldn't voice.

He didn't remember until a bad dream jarred him awake after eight straight hours of sleep that the top bunk was where the snake had stashed the corpse of Doctor Nimzicki.

Daniel had just left; he could hear the click of the closing door in his mind's ear.

He found his pants neatly folded on the footlocker, his boots lined up beside it with the lace ends properly tucked. A rolled-up sheet of legal-pad paper was stuck in one boot like a flower in a vase. The note inside said _Your friendship was the story that mattered_.

Not the stuff they hadn't known about each other. Not the way it ended. What it was.

"The past tense can go fuck itself," he told the paper. "How's that for a linguistic observation?"

But he folded it with care, and when he had his pants and boots back on, he put it in his pocket.

^ 


	3. The Broca Divide

**a yard of sun**

Jack grabbed a plastic chair from next to the defibrillator and placed it carefully next to Daniel's bed so that it wouldn't make that godawful noise scraping against the concrete floor.

"I'm not asleep," Daniel said, the way you'd say "I'm right here" to people talking about you when you were right there.

"Yeah, and about that," Jack said.

Daniel waved his hand to wiggle the line of his IV drip. "Fluids and antibiotics. That's enough. No sedatives."

"You're lucky they have any left."

Daniel flashed one of his not-smiles. "I'm fine. Go home, Jack."

Besides cuts and abrasions wherever his skin had been exposed, some nasty claw marks, and a couple of surprisingly shallow bite marks, he had deep bruising on his trunk and thighs, hairline fractures in two ribs, and blood in his urine. If any other souvenirs of his time as a prehistoric kickball were going to turn up, Jack was going to be around. Daniel had shooed him off a few hours ago, but when he'd checked in with the doc from the commissary, she said he wasn't sleeping; she thought it might be a paradoxical effect of the antihistamine they'd given the Touched, which was different from Daniel's regular allergy meds. A mild sedative should offset it, but after being infected and tranked and injected and hooked up to a tube, Daniel was drawing the line.

"It's just a sleeping pill, Daniel. They won't push anything through the IV."

"Could you hand me that book?"

Jack handed him the book, and picked up the book that had been under it, and opened it. In his best 'Well, I'll be damned' voice, he said, "Well, I'll be damned."

"Upside down," Daniel said, without so much as a sidelong glance.

Jack turned the book over, checked the table of contents, and turned to chapter one. He read page one, thought, _Well, duh_ ; turned the page soundlessly, and read page two.

"If your intent is to annoy me into submission, you realize you're going to have to be more annoying."

"I'm going to bore you into submission."

"I'm reading a book I'm actually interested in."

"For your information," Jack said, and checked the running head for the author's name, "Dungarees and Auto Parts makes some daringly novel observations."

Daniel huffed, which was close enough to a laugh to lift Jack's spirits, and went back to ignoring him.

Jack estimated fifteen minutes until Daniel would slam his book closed and say, "Fine. Give me the pill." He couldn't stomach a third page of anthrobabble, but he ran his gaze along the lines of text while keeping watch on Daniel with his upper peripheral vision. Five minutes later, Daniel said, "Fine. If you're going to stay here, turn your chair around and stop staring at me."

Jack turned the chair around, although he cheated a little and butted it up against the bedframe so that at least he'd feel any significant movement. He stared at the book, and turned the pages every couple of minutes. Daniel was turning pages silently too. After eight pages, Jack was beginning to think that Daniel was either more stubborn than he'd given him credit for, remarkably immune to the suffering of others, or more amenable to companionship than he let on.

Movement at the door caught his eye -- Doc Fraiser, still on duty after thirty hellish hours, coming partway in and catching herself with a visible effort to silence her footsteps. She met his eyes, touched the side of a forefinger to her lips, and gestured past him with her chin.

He twisted carefully in the chair to find Daniel deeply asleep behind him, book open on his chest, glasses halfway down his nose.

He twisted back, gave the doc a thumbs-up, closed the book, and closed his eyes.

>

Someone had dimmed the lights. It hadn't woken him. That was weird.

He twisted around again to check on Daniel, and every muscle in his body cried out. He'd done a number on himself in that isolation room. The worst of it had healed up while he was sedated -- same recuperative effect of the Stone Age flu that healed Carter's stab wound in record time; too bad they couldn't isolate that -- but he still felt as if he'd been tumbled in one of those rock-polishing gizmos.

If they'd kept Daniel sedated for a while before they administered the antidote ... well, he'd still be here for observation, since he was the only one not contained on base while he'd been infected, but he'd probably be less battered.

'Live and learn' wasn't good enough. They had to start learning faster.

He got up, put his book on the stand, slid the book from under Daniel's hands and put it on top, slid the glasses off Daniel's head and put them on top of the books. Daniel smacked his lips a couple of times but didn't stir, except for his fingers curling into the space where the book had been. Jack snuck an extra pillow from the secret cabinet that wasn't, and lay back on the next bed.

If he'd thought he could get away with it, he'd have shifted the stuff out from in between so he could see at a glance whether Daniel was sleeping. The other beds were empty. All the other infected personnel had been cleared and released. The place was quiet. He and the doc had an understanding now. He could take the liberty of occupying the bed. But she'd draw the line at him moving equipment.

He drew the line at flipping around to lie upside down. He was almost asleep again when he heard Daniel try to turn or sit up, then grunt as he reconsidered.

"Still here," Jack said.

"So, still connected to your legs."

"You need anything?"

"Nope."

"'K."

"You really don't have to hang around."

"'Hang'? That's the best you've got?"

"That wasn't a pun. We didn't turn into monkeys."

"Not even space monkeys?"

"Not even _what_?"

Jack realized that he'd been dozing off, talking half from sleep. "Space monkeys," he said, going with it anyway. "Like the little guy in the V2. The first ones out there. Barely trained. Flying blind."

"Suffocating? Exploding? Dying of shock, exposure?"

He'd forgotten Daniel's thing about animal testing. He agreed with him on that, actually. And actually, the comparison held up. "Some of us," he said quietly.

Daniel grunted softly, more acknowledgment than struck-a-nerve. Then he said, "You know you pulled your punches, right?"

"What?"

"You pulled your punches. You gave me a chance to cover up. You didn't break anything."

Oh. That. "SFs pulled me off you."

"If you'd meant to kill me, I'd have already been dead."

He didn't know if he'd meant to kill him. Mostly what was left was a few cringe-worthy visuals of laying into his unit's civilian, and a sick aftertaste of rage and lust. The feel of metal crumpling in his hands on impact with concrete -- cot or chair, maybe. Then nothing until the doc shot him up with enough sedative to bring his consciousness back on line. He was glad he remembered what happened after; they'd drawn a damn fine CMO and he needed to know how he knew that. But the stuff before ... "What the hell kind of hand-to-hand are they teaching you over there, anyway? Don't you know not to go to the ground?"

"Didn't give me much choice, also changing the subject."

"Daniel, much as I'd like to see it your way, the virus was probably already screwing with my coordination." 

"According to Sam, you guys found me sitting with Melosha, on the other side of the fire from the other Touched, sharing food. I'm pretty sure you also made some kind of crack about me, but nobody will tell me what it was, and by the way somebody needs to have a stern talk with you about what you said to Sam when we were leaving, and I don't think it should be me but I don't see an alternative -- " 

"Dozing off here," Jack singsonged, to make it stop.

"I didn't rape Melosha. I didn't have sex with Melosha at all."

Carefully agreeable, Jack said, "The medical report says no indication."

"I remember enough to know I didn't."

"OK."

"So it wasn't 'in virus veritas.' The virus didn't bring out repressed impulses; it tried to subvert our true motivations, push them under in favor of its own imperatives. I know this may sound like I'm trying to draw a parallel between that parasitic virus and the parasitic Goa'uld, and actually there may be connections there, important ones, I mean the Touched might have been some kind of failed Gould experiment and somebody should look at that because there might be things we can learn, some kind of chemical defenses we can develop against being used as hosts, not to mention the fast-healing thing I missed out on, but I was still me, even completely under the influence of the virus. I defended Melosha against competing males without immediately rutting with her myself. Do you see what I'm saying?"

"You were more hungry than horny?"

"No, although clearly you guys thought that I -- "

"No one thought anything." _I thought they'd eat you alive. I thought I'd find you in bloody pieces._ "You survived. You acquired status in a tough crowd." _You saved the girl. I know how much that matters to you. I'm sorry it wasn't your girl._ "I made a bad joke. I was impressed. That's how it came out."

He could hear Daniel's microheadshakes, see his eyes close and his middle finger press between his brows, even though he couldn't.

"It was _affectionate_ ," he said, as close to a growly roar as he could manage with his voice lowered.

"Do you take my point at all, Jack?"

"Yes, Daniel, according to your theory, I pulled my punches."

The way he'd behaved, the little he remembered of what he'd felt, didn't add up. He didn't harbor secret yearnings for Carter. He wasn't happy about the way he'd reacted in the locker room, and if she ever remembered that "Not like _this_ " he was going to have some uncomfortable explaining to do, not because he'd responded, which he had, but because that kind of half-assed deflection was a bad habit he'd picked up as a teen, an inability to deliver a straightforward "No" to people who were hitting on him, an instinct to soft-pedal rejection that he'd thought the military had drummed out of him. But his memory of the virus-colored glasses wasn't a memory of seeing Daniel as a rival for Carter. Maybe that was just because he wasn't interested in Carter that way; no surprise if a fake feeling seemed fake in retrospect. But it hadn't felt fake. It just hadn't felt like it was about what the virus was making it about.

The crack about the shirt -- yeah, admittedly not the best thing he could have said to alleviate her embarrassment. He'd been going for fey and over-the-top, trying to focus on the positive. _Hey, don't feel bad about going ape, the outfit looked great._ From Ferretti or Kawalsky, it would have worked the magic of the outrageously absurd. But they were peers. He was her CO. Daniel was right. It needed fixing.

The impulse to wail on Daniel sure hadn't come from him. So maybe Daniel was right about that too.

He rolled onto his side, worked up some spit and swallowed it to clear the bad taste from his mouth, elbowed up so that he could see Daniel's face past the equipment stand. "I'm still sorry."

Daniel was opening his mouth to answer when the duty nurse came in and asked Daniel how he was feeling and unwrapped a sterile container and politely apologized for having to ask him for another urine sample. Daniel cranked up his bed, and Jack dropped down to give him some privacy while he peed into the cup.

"Apology accepted," Daniel said, with gracious formality, as he handed the container back to the nurse.

"That's very kind of you, sir," the nurse said, in a military-neutral tone that could have indicated deadpan playing-along but probably didn't.

When he'd gone, Daniel said, "I wasn't talking to him."

"I know." Jack was awake enough now to wish he had a cup of coffee. It was going on three. "Think you can sleep some more?"

"I can try."

"Good man." Jack started devising training scenarios in his head. Beat counting airplanes, and his failure to drill his team in field operations was what had led to Daniel being carried off by the Touched. Teal'c had said fire, Daniel had frozen with arms full of a girl Teal'c should not have let him pick up in the first place. Hesitation all around. That wasn't happening again.

Six minutes later, Daniel said, "Wait. 'Sir'?"

What sounded like Daniel's voice calling him sir dragged him back from the edge of sleep in a state of confusion. Then he heard the quotation marks and remembered the nurse. "I thought that thing about being a guest at this party was sarcasm. Have you _looked_ at your pay stubs?"

"Actually, no. It's direct-deposit, so I just stick the envelopes in a drawer."

"Bank statements?"

"Drawer."

"Checkbook?"

"I know my pay grade, I'm just -- Never mind."

"It's weird, huh."

"Yeah. Weird."

"Well, you guys are gonna get to study scientific and cultural stuff. Maybe there'll be some kind of meeting of the twain."

"Evaluate. Other people will probably do the studying."

"So there'll be herds of eggheads roaming the halls." Which it would fall upon Daniel in no small part to vet and hire and manage, at least at the start -- something Jack didn't think had quite dawned on either of his scientists yet, and which would leave Jack managing the fallout of two overextended operatives. But some other night was soon enough to start losing sleep over that. "Should feel a little less weird then."

"Maybe." Daniel was starting to sound drowsy again, finally. "I'm going to sleep now."

"You do that." And Jack did the same, thinking, _Space monkeys. Some of them make it._

^ 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 5/1/15 Fixed Jack's 'Not like _this_ ' line -- was 'Not _here_ ' in previous version. (J/D re-watch is in progress at DWth now. Good for fact-checking own fics! :-)) Also changed 'felt as if he'd been through the spin cycle' to 'felt as if he'd been tumbled in one of those rock-polishing gizmos' -- metaphor fits the Stone Age conceit better, and I used the spin-cycle thing in some other fic, can't remember which.

**Author's Note:**

> This started way back when as a long, rambling, incomplete survey fic exploring the development of Jack and Daniel's relationship through times when they find comfort in sleeping near each other. For JDJunkie's Four Seasons thon at Dreamwidth in April 2014, I pulled out some material I liked, sketched in some more, restructured the whole thing as a series of vignettes, and posted the first two. The re-starting of this owes entirely to JDJ's thon, and it's dedicated to her; the seasons in that thon were the seasons of the year, so there's an intended theme of spring (S1-S3), summer (S4-S5), fall (S7-S8, pun intended), winter (S9-SGU), and spring again (post-all-series). The monthly Seasons (of the show) Challenge at [Event Horizons](http://event-horizons.dreamwidth.org) is good motivation to continue it, so it should be updated at least once a month for the next few months.
> 
> The rating will change as chapters are added. The warnings may change.
> 
> Titles so far are all snurched from the work of Christopher Fry.


End file.
